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of critics investigating the in this way accept the central facts undergirding the . I want to emphasize that not talking about evangelical or conservative scholars only, but about the broad spectrum of New Testament critics who teach at secular universities and non- evangelical seminaries. Amazing as it may seem, most of them have come to regard as historical the basic facts which support the resurrection of Jesus. These facts are as follows: FACT #1: After his Howard Ghislane: The Empty , Jesus was I spoke recently at a major Canadian university on the buried in a tomb by existence of . After my talk, one slightly irate co-ed . wrote on her comment card, “I was with you until you This fact is highly got to the stuff about Jesus. God is not the Christian significant because it God!” means, contrary to radical This attitude is all too typical today. Most people are critics like John Dominic happy to agree that God exists; but in our pluralistic Crossan of the Jesus society it has become politically incorrect to claim that Seminar, that the location God has revealed Himself decisively in Jesus. What of Jesus’ burial site was justification can offer, in contrast to Hindus, known to Jew and Christian , and , for thinking that the Christian God alike. In that case, the is real? disciples could never have proclaimed his resurrection The answer of the New Testament is: the resurrection in if the . “God will judge the world with justice by the had not been empty. New man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to all Testament researchers have Caravaggio: The Deposition men by raising him from the dead” (.31). The established this first fact on resurrection is God’s vindication of Jesus’ radical the basis of evidence such as the following: personal claims to divine authority. 1. Jesus’ burial is attested in the very old tradition So how do we know that Jesus is risen from the dead? quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15.3-5: The hymn writer says, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!” This answer is For I delivered to you as of first perfectly appropriate on an individual level. But when importance what I also received: Christians engage unbelievers in the public square— . . . that died for our sins in such as in “Letters to the Editor” of a local newspaper, accordance with the Scriptures, on call-in programs on talk-radio, at PTA meetings, or and that he was buried, even just in conversation with co-workers—, then it’s and that he was raised on the third day crucial that we be able to present objective evidence in in accordance with the Scriptures, support of our beliefs. Otherwise our claims hold no and that he appeared to Cephas, then more water than the assertions of anyone else claiming to the Twelve. to have a private experience of God. Paul not only uses the typical rabbinical terms Fortunately, , as a rooted in , “received” and “delivered” with regard to the makes claims that can in important measure be information he is passing on to the Corinthians, but investigated historically. Suppose, then, that we vv. 3-5 are a highly stylized four-line formula filled approach the New Testament writings, not as inspired with non-Pauline characteristics. This has convinced Scripture, but merely as a collection of Greek all scholars that Paul is, as he says, quoting from documents coming down to us out of the first century, an old tradition which he himself received after without any assumption as to their reliability other than becoming a Christian. This tradition probably goes the way we normally regard other sources of ancient back at least to Paul’s fact-finding visit to history. We may be surprised to learn that the majority Jerusalem around AD 36, when he spent two the following: with Cephas and James (Gal. 1.18). It thus dates to within five years after Jesus’ death. So short a time One could go on, but I think that enough has been said span and such personal contact make it idle to talk to indicate why, in the words of Jacob Kremer, an of legend in this case. Austrian specialist in the resurrection, “By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical 2. The burial story is part of very old source statements concerning the .”2 material used by Mark in writing his . The gospels tend to consist of brief snapshots of Jesus’ FACT #3: On life which are loosely connected and not always multiple occasions chronologically arranged. But when we come to the and under various passion story we do have one, smooth, circumstances, continuously-running narrative. This suggests that different individuals story was one of Mark’s sources of and groups of information in writing his gospel. Now most people experienced scholars think Mark is already the earliest gospel, appearances of and Mark’s source for Jesus’ passion is, of course, Jesus alive from the even older. Comparison of the narratives of the four dead. gospels shows that their accounts do not diverge This is a fact which is from one another until after the burial. This implies almost universally that the burial account was part of the passion acknowledged among story. Again, its great age militates against its New Testament being legendary. scholars, for the 3. As a member of the Jewish court that following reasons: condemned Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely 1. The empty tomb story is also part of the old to be a Christian invention. There was strong passion source used by Mark. The passion source resentment against the Jewish leadership for their used by Mark did not end in death and defeat, but role in the condemnation of Jesus (I Thess. 2.15). with the empty tomb story, which is grammatically It is therefore highly improbable that Christians of one piece with the burial story. would invent a member of the court that condemned Jesus who honors Jesus by giving him a 2. The old tradition cited by Paul in I Cor. 15.3-5 proper burial instead of allowing him to be implies the fact of the empty tomb. For any first dispatched as a common criminal. century Jew, to say that of a dead man “that he was buried and that he was raised” is to imply that 4. No other competing burial story exists. If the a vacant grave was left behind. Moreover, the burial by Joseph were fictitious, then we would expression “on the third day” probably derives from expect to find either some historical trace of what the women’s visit to the tomb on the third day, in actually happened to Jesus’ corpse or at least some Jewish reckoning, after the crucifixion. The four-line competing legends. But all our sources are tradition cited by Paul summarizes both unanimous on Jesus’ honorable interment by accounts and the early apostolic preaching (Acts Joseph. 13. 28-31); significantly, the third line of the For these and other reasons, the majority of New tradition corresponds to the empty tomb story. Testament critics concur that Jesus was buried in a 3. The story is simple and lacks signs of legendary tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. According to the late embellishment. All one has to do to appreciate this John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the burial point is to compare Mark’s account with the wild of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and best- legendary stories found in the second-century attested facts about Jesus.”1 apocryphal gospels, in which Jesus is seen coming FACT #2: On out of the tomb with his head reaching up above the the clouds and followed by a talking cross! following the 4. The fact that women’s testimony was discounted crucifixion, in first century Palestine stands in favor of the Jesus’ tomb women’s role in discovering the empty tomb. was found According to , the testimony of women empty by a was regarded as so worthless that it could not even group of his be admitted into a Jewish court of law. Any later women legendary story would certainly have made male followers. disciples discover the empty tomb. Among the 5. The earliest Jewish allegation that the disciples reasons which had stolen Jesus’ body (Matt. 28.15) shows that the have led most body was in fact missing from the tomb. The scholars to this earliest Jewish response to the disciples’ conclusion are proclamation, “He is risen from the dead!” was not to point to his occupied tomb and to laugh them off these four facts? Most sholars probably remain agnostic as fanatics, but to claim that they had taken away about this question. But the Christian can maintain that Jesus’ body. Thus, we have evidence of the empty the hypothesis that best explains these facts is “God tomb from the very opponents of the early raised Jesus from the dead.” Christians. In his book Justifying Historical Descriptions, historian C. Even Gert L¸demann, the leading German critic of the B. McCullagh lists six tests which historians use in resurrection, himself admits, “It may be taken as determining what is the best explanation for given historically certain that Peter and the disciples had historical facts.6 The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to the dead” passes all these tests: them as the risen Christ.”3 1. It has great explanatory scope: it explains why the FACT #4: The original tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw post- disciples believed that mortem appearances of Jesus, and why the Christian Jesus was risen from the faith came into being. dead despite their having every predisposition to the 2. It has great explanatory power: it explains why contrary. Think of the the body of Jesus was gone, why people repeatedly situation the disciples saw Jesus alive despite his earlier public execution, faced after Jesus’ and so forth. crucifixion: 3. It is plausible: given the historical context of Jesus’ 1. Their leader was dead. And own unparalleled life and claims, the resurrection Jews had no in a dying, serves as divine of those radical claims. much less rising, . The 4. It is not ad hoc or contrived: it requires only one Messiah was supposed to additional hypothesis: that God exists. And even that throw off Israel’s enemies (= needn’t be an additional hypothesis if one already Rome) and re-establish a that God exists. Davidic reign—not suffer the ignominious death of criminal. 5. It is in accord with accepted beliefs. The hypothesis: “God raised Jesus from the dead” doesn’t 2. According to Jewish law, Jesus’ execution as a in any way conflict with the accepted belief that criminal showed him out to be a heretic, a man people don’t rise naturally from the dead. The literally under the curse of God (Deut. 21.23). The Christian accepts that belief as wholeheartedly as he catastrophe of the crucifixion for the disciples was not accepts the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from simply that their Master was gone, but that the the dead. crucifixion showed, in effect, that the had been right all along, that for three years they had 6. It far outstrips any of its rival hypotheses in been following a heretic, a man accursed by God! meeting conditions (1)-(5). Down through history various alternative explanations of the facts have 3. Jewish beliefs about the precluded been offered, for example, the conspiracy hypothesis, anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and the apparent death hypothesis, the hallucination before the general resurrection at the hypothesis, and so forth. Such hypotheses have been end of the world. All the disciples could do was to almost universally rejected by contemporary preserve their Master’s tomb as a shrine where his scholarship. None of these naturalistic hypotheses bones could reside until that day when all of Israel’s succeeds in meeting the conditions as well as the righteous dead would be raised by God to glory. resurrection hypothesis. Despite all this, the original disciples believed in and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus’ resurrection. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar from Emory University, muses, “some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was . . . .”4 N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, “that is why, as a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.”5 In summary, there are four facts agreed upon by the majority of scholars who have written on these subjects which any adequate historical hypothesis must account for: Jesus’ entombment by Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection. Now this puts the skeptical critic in a rather desperate situation. A few years ago I participated in a debate on Now the question is: what is the best explanation of the resurrection of Jesus with a professor at the University of California, Irvine. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the resurrection, and he was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. He could not deny the facts of Jesus’ honorable burial, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection. So his only recourse was to come up with some alternate explanation of those facts. And so he argued that Jesus of had an unknown, identical twin , who was separated from him as an infant and grew up independently, but who came back to Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’ body out of the tomb, and presented himself to the disciples, who mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead! Now I won’t bother to go into how I went about refuting this theory. But I think the example is illustrative of the desperate lengths to which skepticism must go in order to refute the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, the evidence is so powerful that one of the world’s leading Jewish theologians, the late Pinchas Lapide, who taught at Hebrew University in Israel, declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised from the Notes dead!7 1 John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God The significance of the resurrection of Jesus lies in the (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973), p. 131. fact that it is not just any old Joe Blow who has been raised from the dead, but Jesus of Nazareth, whose 2 Jacob Kremer, Die Osterevangelien—Geschichten um crucifixion was instigated by the Jewish leadership Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), pp. because of his blasphemous claims to divine authority. If 49-50. this man has been raised from the dead, then the God 3 Gerd L¸demann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, whom he allegedly blasphemed has clearly vindicated his trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John claims. Thus, in an age of religious relativism and Knox Press, 1995), p. 80. pluralism, the resurrection of Jesus constitutes a solid rock on which Christians can take their stand for God’s 4 Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: decisive self-revelation in Jesus. Harper San Francisco, 1996), p. 136. 5 N. T. Wright, “The New Unimproved Jesus,” Christianity Today (September 13, 1993), p. 26.

6 C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 19. 7 Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. Wilhelm C. Linss (London: SPCK, 1983). by William Lane Craig

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